544 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
Books and schools go together and both are essential to progress of thought in the Church. The mediaeval cata logue of the convent of Muri asserts strongly the close union of the intellectual and religious life. It becomes us, so it ran, always to copy, adorn, improve, and annotate books, because the life of the spiritual man is nothing without books.1
Happy was the convent that possessed a few volumes.2 The convent and the cathedral were almost the sole recep tacles for books. Here they were most safe from the vandal ism of invaders and the ravages of fire, so frequent in the Middle Ages; and here they were accessible to the constitu ency which could read. It was a current saying, first traced to Gottfried, canon of St. Barbe-en-Auge, that a convent without a library is like a fortress without arms.3 During the early Middle Ages, there were small collections of books at York, Fulda, Monte Cassino, and other monasteries. They were greatly prized, and ecclesiastics made journeys to get them, as did Biscop, abbot of Wearmouth, who made five trips to Italy for that purpose. During the two centuries and more after Gregory VII. , the use and the number of books increased ; but it remained for the zeal of Petrarch in the fourteenth century to open a new era in the history of libraries. The period of the Renaissance which followed witnessed an unexampled avidity for old manuscripts which the tran sition of scholars from Constantinople made it possible to satisfy.
To the convents of Western Europe, letters and religion owe a lasting debt, not only for the preservation of books, but for their multiplication. The monks of St. Benedict have the first place as the founders of libraries and guardians of pa tristic and classical literature. Their Rules required them to do a certain amount of reading each day, and at the begin-
1 Quia vita omnium spiritualium hominum sine libris nihil est, quoted by Wetzer-Welte, II. 792.
2 Hurter, Innocent TIL IV. 179.
3 Claustrum sine armario quasi est castrum sine armamentaria. See Maitland, p. 230 ; Wattenbach, p. 570.
§ 89. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 545
ning of Lent each received a book from the cloistral collec tion and was expected to read it " straight through." This direction shines as a light down through the history of the monastic institutions, though many a convent probably pos sessed no books and some of them had little appreciation of their value.
A collection of several hundred books was relatively as large a library as a collection of hundreds of thousands of vol umes would be now. Fleury, in the twelfth century, had 238 volumes, St. Riquier 258. 1 The destruction of the English monastery of Croyland in the eleventh century involved the loss of " 300 original and more than 400 smaller volumes." The conventual buildings were destroyed in the night by fire. The interesting letter of the abbot Ingulph, relating the calamity, speaks of beautiful manuscripts, illuminated with pictures and adorned with crosses of gold. The good abbot, after describing the loss of the chapel, infirmary, and other parts of the buildings, went on to say " our cellar and the very casks, full of beer, were also burnt up." 2
Catalogues are preserved from this period. Edwards gives a list of thirty-three mediseval catalogues of English libraries.3 The catalogue of Priifening in Salzburg, 1158, prepared by " one who was a born librarian," 4 arranged the volumes in three classes : copies of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and modern writers. The books, most frequently found, were the Bible, or parts of it, the liturgical books, — Augustine, Gregory the Great, Jerome, and Ambrose, — and among the writers of the Carlovingian age, Bede and Alcuin. The catalogue of Corbie, Picardy, dating from the twelfth century, gives 39 copies of Augustine, 16 of Jerome, 13 of Bede, 15 of Boethius, and 5 of Cicero, as well as copies of Terence, Livy, Pliny, and Seneca.5 Of later mediaeval writers, the works of Anselm, Bernard, Hugo, and Abselard are found most often, but many collections were without a single recent writer. The otherwise rich collection of St.
1 Clark, p. 25. 2 Maitland, pp. 286 sqq.
8 Edwards, pp. 448-454. * Hauck, IV. 448. * Edwards, p. 52.
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